The real issue is not tabs/spaces vs braces but academic/scientific orientation vs engineering/commercial needs. Mostly these worlds are so far separated that no dialogue happens -- think C vs Pascal, Java vs Eiffel etc
The problem -- actually advantage -- is that Python straddles both worlds. Mailers messing code, even editors messing (large) refactorings are engineering concerns. The visual clarity of (usually small) pieces of code is an academic concern. Ive been in both worlds: being able to have a significant piece of code projected on a single screen is often the single biggest factor which makes something teachable or not. And indentation based structure is not the only thing that aids this in languages like python and haskell -- think of comprehensions, no type declarations, REPL removing the need for (most) print statements etc etc. Conversely there are 'real-world' situations where python's indentation breaks things -- eg python-server-pages where python's indentation mixes badly with html's <tag> </tag> As far as I am concerned python would not be python if its indentation=structure went. However the original question -- mixing tabs and spaces is bad -- has got lost in the flames. Do the most die-hard python fanboys deny this? And if not is it asking too much (say in python3) that mixing tabs and spaces be flagged as an error or at least warning? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
